by Jan Burke
“You don’t have to explain,” Miriam said. “This isn’t the first wild idea she’s had.”
“Harriman,” the chief interrupted, still studying him. “You’re handling the Randolph cases, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Frank said, surprised not only that Ellis Hale knew such a detail, but also that he didn’t refer to it as the “Lefebvre case.”
Hale frowned and glanced toward Carlson, but said nothing more.
“Your sister is on her way?” Frank asked Miriam.
“Yes, but I don’t think she’ll make it down here much before midnight.”
“Harriman,” the chief said, “perhaps you should call your wife and tell her that Miriam here could use another female — a sensible female — by her side tonight.”
“If Mrs. Bredloe would like that, sir — certainly.” He wondered if Irene would answer the phone if he called.
“Oh, yes,” Miriam said. “Thank you.”
“One other thing,” the chief said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Trent Randolph was a man I thought of with respect, and he was a friend of this department. When I think of what he might have been able to do as a commissioner had he lived…” His brows drew together, deepening his frown. “I was supposed to meet with him before he left for that trip to Catalina with his children. I was forced to reschedule — and Trent offered to cancel the trip so that we could meet that same day. You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I’d agreed to that offer. But I told him to enjoy his weekend with his kids and set up a meeting for that Monday. I never saw him again.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Not half as sorry as I am, that’s for damn sure. When Trent’s son was murdered…” He faltered and fell silent, suddenly looking tired. Several moments passed before he seemed to shake off his memories and the mood he had fallen into. The chief glanced at Carlson again, then said to Frank, “Your father was in law enforcement, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Bakersfield PD.”
“Then no one needs to explain to you the importance of resolving this matter quickly.”
“The matter of Lefebvre’s guilt or innocence?”
“Don’t mention that name to me!” the chief snapped.
Taken aback, Frank said nothing.
Miriam straightened in her chair. She stared at the chief in disbelief and said, “Ellis, I wouldn’t have expected that from you.”
The chief’s face flamed red. He seemed more embarrassed than angry, but Frank found himself wishing that Miriam had not come to his defense.
“Call your wife, Detective Harriman,” Hale said brusquely, then stared at him, as if daring him to react to this curt dismissal.
It rankled, but he wasn’t about to let Hale know that. Keeping his voice cool and even, he said, “Yes, sir,” and walked away.
He had to walk outside the building to get a signal for his cell phone. He called home and got the answering machine — not a good sign.
“Irene? It’s Frank. Are you there?” He waited, but she didn’t answer before the machine cut the call off. He had left a note for her, telling her where he was and asking her to listen to the messages Pete had left on the answering machine. He wondered if she had even seen the note — or bothered to read it. Maybe she had been too busy packing.
As he tried to decide what to do next, his cell phone rang. The caller ID display on the phone showed his home number. “Irene?” he answered.
“How’s Bredloe doing?”
“Not good. There may be brain damage, and he might not even—” The words seemed to sink in for the first time as he said them. He suddenly felt his throat tighten and couldn’t go on.
The silence stretched, then she said, “Do you need me to be there?”
“I know you hate hospitals, but Miriam’s here with nothing but — nothing but flaming assholes from the department around her.”
“That is an emergency. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
They didn’t talk about their argument, though he could tell she was still angry with him. But long after the others — including the chief — left, they stayed with Miriam. Frank was glad Irene was there to comfort her — and to help him keep his own hopes up.
Those hopes suffered a setback a little before ten o’clock, when he first saw Bredloe.
The captain had been moved into the intensive care unit. He had not regained consciousness. Frank tried to tell himself that he had seen crime victims survive more terrible injuries, but he had not known those individuals personally or seen them before they were hurt. He could not reconcile the Bredloe he knew, always a strong and healthy man, with the pale, stitched, and bandaged one lying so still on this hospital bed, attached by tubing and wiring to machines and medications.
The doctors seemed to think that their work to save the captain’s life had gone well and were optimistic about his chances for survival, even if they avoided predicting what impairments the head injuries would cause.
An orderly handed Miriam a large plastic bag, explaining that it contained the clothing her husband had been wearing when he was admitted. Frank watched as she peered into the bag, then reached to support her as she nearly fainted.
“Let Frank look through it for you,” Irene suggested as he guided Miriam to a chair.
But Miriam shook her head and began sorting what remained of the bloodstained and battered clothing from inside the bag. She separated the contents, placing them on the chair next to her own, then tenderly folded each item before putting it back in the bag. The pants were completely ruined, obviously cut away by ER doctors hurrying to treat his wounds. His shirt had not fared much better. She was smoothing the stained but relatively intact suit coat when she paused, then reached into an inside pocket. She removed what Frank at first thought was a document of some kind. She held it up, a puzzled look on her face.
“What in the world was he doing with this?” she asked.
As Frank drew closer, he saw the reason for her question. What he had thought to be a document was a fancy paper airplane.
14
Monday, July 10, 10:01 P.M.
A Private Home in Las Piernas
The Looking Glass Man double-checked all the blinds and curtains. He secured all three dead bolts on the front door, pausing to polish his fingerprints from their gleaming brass surfaces. He did not do this because of concerns regarding evidence — it was perfectly natural that his own fingerprints would be found in his own home. He simply did not like to see any sort of smudge on the locks.
Satisfied with these and other safeguards, he moved to the back of the house, to the large walk-in closet off his bedroom. The light was already on — triggered by a motion detector in the bedroom itself. He took a moment to survey the perfectly polished and aligned shoes, to admire the shirts on their hangers — all facing the same way, each buttoned up to the second highest button on the front. They were arranged by color, lightest to darkest, and each was spaced exactly three-quarters of an inch from the shirt next to it, so that they never touched and therefore never wrinkled or creased a neighboring shirt. He glanced at the side of the closet that held his more casual clothes and adjusted the neatly ironed pair of blue jeans so that it was more precisely centered on its hanger.
The switch for the closet light was in the “on” position. It was always in this position. He pushed slightly on one side of the switch plate, which, like the switch itself, was nothing more than camouflage. The plate swung away to reveal an alarm keypad. He entered a code and heard a series of bolts click in the ceiling above him. He moved a small step stool to the middle of the closet floor.
He pulled down on the access door to the attic, which was unlocked. He did not place a lock on the door because he did not wish to draw attention to it. He returned the step stool to its place, then lowered the ladder built into the access door. Carefully, he climbed until he could reach the true barrier to the attic: a heavy, steel-plated hatch. He lifted it, reaching for the switche
s for the lights and ventilation system inside the attic before climbing higher.
He smiled to himself, just as he always did when entering this room. He still used other sites as needed, but after the Randolph killings he felt it had become imperative that he acquire a permanent residence over which he was the only landlord, the only man with keys to the front door.
The element of risk did not excite him. He disliked risk. That was why he needed a special house, a house that would seem like any other house from the outside. He had patiently waited for a house in this tract, where every fifth or sixth home was of a style with a high-pitched roof. It was, in fact, the very neighborhood where Wendell Leroy Wallace had once lived. Wallace had been a man with the kind of genius that the Looking Glass Man admired. Like Wallace, he needed a place to build unique devices.
Not that anyone looking at the house from the street would be aware of the extraordinary activities taking place within it. Even from the inside — unless one knew where to look — the house seemed average.
Far less important to him than the house itself was this attic room. He bought this house because of the pitch of its roof. He ran the numbers in his head — the pitch of the roof was 12/12 — the attic was fifteen feet high under the ridge and sloped steeply to zero at the walls — a lovely space of eight hundred square feet where the headroom was over seven feet. He found construction nearly as fascinating as destruction.
He ate and slept and bathed in the house, but these were activities he could have carried out in any house. Some said a man’s home was his castle, but he preferred to think of his home as a moat, a large defense system protecting the real castle — this attic with its hidden treasures.
He had done almost all of the work on the attic himself, a fact that pleased him for many reasons — one being that his participation reduced the need to eliminate more than two skilled workmen after they had completed their part of the project. It had not been difficult to arrange the deaths of a roofer and his helper at their next job site. People expected roofers to fall off roofs in the same way they expected race car drivers to crash.
He regretted the necessity, of course. He did not enjoy killing. Murder was always a last resort, to be avoided if at all possible. The roofers — although they did fail to obtain the proper building permits for the work done on his property — weren’t really criminals. Even though that permit business technically made them lawbreakers, he counted them among the innocent. Until today, only six of his victims had been innocent. Bredloe made the seventh.
He cringed, realizing that he was guilty of an inaccuracy. Bredloe was still clinging to life, and Bredloe could not, therefore, be counted as a murder victim. Not yet.
Careless thinking. Careless thinking easily led to careless actions. He did not have a perfect record. He knew this. It was the source of most of his unhappiness.
He pulled the ladder up after him, secured the access door and hatch, and reset the alarm from a pad inside the attic. Should anyone enter the house while he was up here, he would have plenty of time to destroy any incriminating materials. The mere thought of finding it necessary to do so made him shudder.
He took his newest notebook from its hiding place in one of the small safes in the attic floor — the compartment under the loose carpeting in the northeast corner of the room — and placed it on the immaculate desk in the middle of the room. He selected a mechanical pencil from a line of three of them in the top drawer of the desk.
He closed his eyes for a moment, mentally reviewing the events of the day. He had been forced to act hastily — haste was not the same thing as carelessness, merely an invitation to it. He must make certain that any errors were corrected. This was his first opportunity to reflect on all that had happened today…
He had been paged while watching Harriman. The page had not been sent by a human caller. Years ago, he had made a change in the software used in the property room. The people who worked in Property were like most people who used computers. They used them in the same way they used their refrigerators and television sets — as long as the computer functioned and did what they expected it to do, they did not investigate its inner workings.
So when he made the small change in the program, it went unnoticed. The property room staff was totally unaware that whenever anyone asked for evidence from certain cases, the property room computer sent a message to his own computer. And when his computer received the message, it dialed his pager number and left a code indicating which evidence had been requested and the name of the person making the request. Today it had indicated that Bredloe was looking at the evidence the department had gathered against Lefebvre. When he realized which evidence in particular the captain had studied, his sense of alarm had increased.
It would not be easy, he had realized, to lure Bredloe away from the office. An intensive investigation would be launched into any attack on the captain of the Homicide Division. Seeing the newspaper article about the unveiling of the mural had reminded him of the Sheffield Club, and suddenly he had known where he would ask Bredloe to meet him. The Looking Glass Man had attended the event — not knowing at that time how useful it would be.
It had not been difficult to gain access to the building. The disguise had been effective. He already knew that security at the site was lax. No one on that job would question someone who was carrying equipment into the building. He had entered unnoticed while most of the workers were washing up and putting their tools away.
He was able to install the cameras and lights within thirty minutes. It was the end of the workday — the Sheffield was already nearly empty. While he ran cables to a monitor — which would only appear to be taping what was seen by the cameras — he checked to make sure no one was nearby. Then he used a pallet jack to position the load of bricks and put the remote-controlled lift in place beneath the pallet itself.
He made sure that the ramp from the publicity event was still accessible and that Bredloe would be able to enter through the front doors. The most difficult aspect to arrange was the single whimsical note — the paper airplane. He had worried that the small fan — a second remote would trigger its operation — would be discovered before he was ready to launch the plane. He dared not try a test launch there, and feared the plane would not perform as he hoped it would — in the science of paper airplane flight, every room was different, with drafts and thermal factors that could ruin everything.
Though he had installed the fan that afternoon, the plane had been ready to go since Saturday, when the department grapevine was buzzing with rumors about Lefebvre’s plane being found. He had intended the paper plane for Frank Harriman, a final little touch to be used at some future date if necessary — but the Looking Glass Man had decided to use it now, curious to see if Harriman would make the connection between it and the Cessna. But today’s flight had not, after all, been such a bad experiment.
With everything in place, he had made a single phone call — at that dreadful bus station! — and the captain was on his way.
He had been pleased with all the mechanical aspects of the plan and could not help but feel a sense of pride in his quick thinking. He was not so foolish as to believe his problems were over now. But he had been able to contain the damage that might have been done. He sighed, saddened that his work on behalf of justice require the sacrifice of a man like Bredloe. This, he decided, must be how a victorious general felt in the aftermath of battle — exhilarated by the achievement but mournful over the loss of life among his troops. Like a general, he must concentrate on the ultimate and worthy objective. Some lives might be lost, but many others would be saved. By his own reckoning, he had already saved hundreds of lives, spared all kinds of suffering and deprivation.
Yes, he thought, I am a general. At war with Judge Lewis Kerr.
The Looking Glass Man acknowledged that he was driven by hatred, not of a race or nation — that kind of hatred he found abhorrent — but rather of a single individual. He did not consider this hatred an im
perfection, and his hatred of Judge Kerr did not make him unhappy. On the contrary, he knew his anger toward Kerr fueled all the finer fires of his existence. At its onset, that anger had been a remedy for pain, and seeking relief, he had fantasized Kerr’s death at his hands a thousand times over. Each hour, it seemed, brought some new vision of Kerr’s demise: a delivery of food poisoned with undetectable substances, a prescription that had been altered, household “accidents” — an electrical problem or a small but smoky fire — a shove into traffic or down a flight of stairs. He had seen so much murder in his career, it was not difficult to consider methods that might end another man’s life.
These visions of Kerr’s death brought a certain measure of delight, but none seemed to correspond with the Looking Glass Man’s notions of a fitting punishment, and so he hesitated to implement any of them. Sadly, he would only be able to kill Kerr once and must not squander his chance.
Over the years, though, as his anger burned on — hollowing him, hardening him — he became glad for the reluctance that had made him delay the pleasure of slaying Kerr — for in that time he learned of a magnificent opportunity, a perfect event to bring matters to an appropriate close, an event that was now not so far away. A plan had slowly emerged, and he prepared. He learned his craft, honed his skills. And took comfort in the good he was doing while he waited.
He had bided his time in the service of justice. It had become a challenge, a true challenge, to make certain that the worst criminals set loose by Kerr’s idiotic rulings were later caught again and prosecuted successfully. It mattered not at all to the Looking Glass Man that the criminals were never guilty of these later crimes, that these later crimes were ones he himself had planned. No, that was the joy of it! He wrote the script, managed the stage, set the props, and ultimately, directed the action. If someone else got the credit for capturing these lowlifes, it didn’t trouble him. After all, the arresting officers were just another set of players. The last thing he wanted was the limelight.